


waiting over here (for life to begin)

by trillingstar



Category: Adventures in Babysitting (1987)
Genre: Character Study, Chicago (City), Female Protagonist, Flying, Gen, Memory Related, Misses Clause Challenge, Therapy, Yuletide, Yuletide 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:25:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5466611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trillingstar/pseuds/trillingstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sara's still not sure exactly what had happened out there on the unfinished floor.  She'd poked around, walking past paint supplies, broken pallets, metallic tubing, and come out by an open window, its protective plastic sheeting peeled back by a whipping wind.  </p><p>Her theory is that it had been an invitation.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	waiting over here (for life to begin)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silk_knickers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silk_knickers/gifts).



> Many, many thanks to my amazing cheerleader & beta [](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ozsaur)[](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ozsaur)**ozsaur** ♥
> 
> Title from Pete Yorn's great tune Life on a Chain.  
>  
> 
> Happy Yuletide, silk_knickers!  
> 

Here are the truths. Sara falls from ledges and out of the rafters. She falls out of the tallest trees. From the topmost point of lighthouses, the vent ball hard as diamond in her hands. A lighthouse in a dream could lead to falling into the sea, and drifting down into its cool, dark depths.

She's not afraid of heights or the dark, so her dreams aren't nightmares. Sometimes there's the razor-sharp scrape of wind rushing up against her face, and sometimes she wakes up feeling battered, flung around in the sky. Normally it's like gliding, a full-body buoy of air, and mostly it's peaceful to fall every night and never land.

*

Sara is on the cusp of womanhood – gag – when suddenly her age matters because thirteen is some magical number to divorce lawyers. Supposedly the whole thing will be completely amicable because even though her dad's moving to California, he and her mother will continue to be the very best of friends. Her mom sounds sincere, but Sara's not buying it. Brad's seated on the couch next to her and they swap identical expressions of disbelief, wide eyes and bitten lips, unwilling to talk until they're alone.

Brad's home for Thanksgiving break so he gets to leave again, but Sara's stuck with badly-wired parental units and she can't even take the bus anywhere because it doesn't run out to their part of the suburbs on holiday weekends. 

Instead she takes to moping around in her room, playing loud music that she knows her dad hates and not caring at all. She ignores her mom and refuses to let her dad hug her on the morning that he leaves for San Jose. She's extra sarcastic to everyone on purpose because everything is tense and stilted, and there's no one to talk to is the thing. Brad's her do-right brother who'd taken the news in stride, then told her later that he hadn't even really been surprised. It had been over the phone so Sara hadn't known if he'd been lying. Chris is in Germany for her semester abroad. Never in a million years would Sara go to Daryl for a heart-to-heart. He lives in a frat on-campus at U of C and he's never talked to her like anything but a little kid, so screw him.

Her friends aren't interested because most of their parents are already divorced, with varying results. It's kind of embarrassing now, but Sara had kept a torch lit for Thor until she was practically in junior high. So they probably think she's just, like, the weird girl who thinks superheroes are real, and that she could be one.

*

Still, she falls out of moving cars and into dark pits, off of buildings, balconies, and clock towers. Off of the sides and crests of mountains. Circus big-top tents. The observation decks on the Space Needle. Summits and cliffs. If it's the tallest thing in her dream, it's her starting point.

*

After the panic attack Sara had on an art class field trip to the AC, she had to visit both the guidance counselor and a specialist – a shrink, Brad called him, and he'll shrink your alien brain – and she had shivered her way through the appointment, perched on one end of a couch, determined to keep quiet and play dumb so the shrink wouldn't even want her defective brain. Her mom held her hand as encouragement at first, but the doctor hadn't ever felt like anyone Sara wanted as a friend.

There were two windows in his office, thin but wide enough that she could see the sky. Nearly every time she sat rigidly on the couch, miserable, rain had pounded on the windows, the clouds outside thunderous and dark. 

He'd prescribed adherence to a rigid nighttime schedule and pills that made her feel sick to her stomach, like, so bad it made her puke sometimes, and not taking them had become the biggest secret she'd ever kept. 

*

She floats, the perfect bird's eye view of the landscape revealing riverbeds and dewy wheat fields. A warm breeze tickles across the back of her neck. She feels like she's headed somewhere.

*

They'd met up sort of accidentally once after That Night, and Chris had treated them all to milkshakes at the diner. The Original Four, tucked into the back table, and slurping ice cream through straws. But then it had been kind of boring because really what did they have to talk about, especially after all Thor-related conversation had been banned from the table. Otherwise Sara would have had plenty to say. After that, Chris wised up and left for college. That's how Sara's dad had put it. Chris had come over to the Anderson house, and she knelt on the dusty ground. Sara let herself be swept up in an extra-tight goodbye hug that went on too long; even Brad rolled his eyes. 

"Not like you died or something," he says, and Sara rolls her eyes right back at him over the curve of Chris's shoulder. The collar of her coat smells like Love's Baby Soft. 

"No duh," Sara says, wishing she was taller so she could pin him with a haughty look. She steps toward him and settles for a swift, well-placed swing of her Thor hammer to Brad's left shin. 

"I'm just glad you're okay," Chris says, straightening up. "All of you. That was – I know I keep saying it, but – that was a wild night."

"Wildly unforgettable!" Brad says. "Because, uh, you know, you were like, not – not forgettable."

Sara narrows her eyes, smirking at him. "It's not very nice to tell Chris that you think she's forgettable."

Leaving them standing in the driveway, she walks away first because otherwise she'll cry and that's not happening. It's not like they're really friends, duh, Chris is graduating high school in a few months and will be gone forever. But at the same time it feels like Chris, and for once her dumb brother, have her back, even when she's needed him on purpose. It's comforting is all. And tears would wreck it, so she goes right to her room and falls onto the bed, wrapped up in her rescued cape, surrounded by a protective barrier of Thors on the walls.

*

Falls off of her own roof and then off the roof of her college dorm, again and again. Tumbles down the sides of pyramids. Jumps over Niagara Falls coiled up in a barrel. Swirls out of mid-flight airplane doors. 

*

She imagines writing it all down, an essay titled 'What Happened on the Way to Häagen-Dazs'. Wonders who would believe her words. Her memories from That Night have changed over the years, which is totally natural, no question. Brains are weird like that.

But – if she'd written everything down right after Chris had come upstairs, when she'd been riding on adrenaline. The visceral reaction on paper, like an initial report, would be amazing to read now. It would have been the event, fresh in her mind at that moment.

Sara's still not sure exactly what had happened out there on the unfinished floor. She'd poked around, walking past paint supplies, broken pallets, metallic tubing, and come out by an open window, its protective plastic sheeting peeled back by a whipping wind. 

Her theory is that it had been an invitation.

*

Falls off of Ferris wheels, off train trestles, off overpasses, and into grassy gorges. She spends a lot of time on the water tower in her hometown. It looks like a giant robin's egg, the stenciled letters looming in the background as she sits on the thin railing, swinging her legs. She'll push off eventually.

*

Going outside had seemed like a safe thing to do, and it had been easy enough to swing herself out on the rope. She'd figured out right away it had been a mistake to let go of the rope, being so far away from the relative safety of the window ledge. She definitely hadn't expected the bearded guy to follow her out.

Now her memory of it comes in odd sensory flashes: the squeak of her sneakers against the cold glass; hair tickling her face as she'd gauged her position, looking down at the distant lights and tiny cars on the street; she'd barely escaped, lost her cape downstairs, and shivered in the wind.

Whatever got her out there, it had been enough to spark an annual pilgrimage to Chicago, even when she didn't know anyone there anymore. She calls it her vacation and lets everyone believe she goes to a resort. 

Each time she works on her attachment to the Associates Center, which sounds so stupid and snobbish but that's what Dr. Meenathep calls it and he's the professional. Sara supposes that there are stranger things than obsessions with skyscrapers, but she trusts him with most things. The building has a different name now, but she can't call it anything in her mind but the Diamond. She's thought about each of its floors after all, many times over; she falls from the 582nd foot more times than any other structure's highest point.

A few years ago, she'd bypassed downtown altogether, instead returning to the street where Dawson's Garage had stood. She'd never thought to go back there, half-convinced that it had been some kind of mass hallucination. She had been fine not remembering how Chris had started the car. And it had all been pretty out there, thinking back on it. They'd been dressed for colder weather, bundled up. Chris wore a scarf and gloves. 

Thor, on the other hand, wore a shirt designed to show off his body. Gross, not that she'd known that the first time, when she'd knelt at his feet. But now, yeah, she can appreciate tickets to the gun show. He'd appeared so dramatically and then palmed a sledgehammer; that whole sitch had been kind of weird, honestly. 

Even Brad had barely remembered Thor. He'd been at work, overseeing freshman orientation at USC, and didn't want to talk when she called. She pressed for details anyway.

"I don't know," Brad finally said. "Intimidating, kind of? Tall. Weird."

There, that settled it.

The shop had been closed for a while, with all of the windows boarded up, and scraps of an orange eviction notice clinging to the front door. A flash memory of dim light, the pervasive smell of motor oil a tickle in her throat, and an imposing figure whose eyes burned through her even after they'd softened with kindness.

*

Elevator shafts are the worst because there's basically nothing to look at as she falls. Abandoned wells are up there too, and excavation mines. A never-ending fall in slow-motion, air currents propping her up, an opportunity to exploit muscle memory, knowledge she can't remember how she came by.

*

This is the truth. She'd been scared, but only by getting caught. The men chasing them wanted to kidnap Sara or sell her to the highest bidder or murder her. If she'd known it was about the magazine she probably wouldn't have dived out the window. She'd acted instinctively, yet had felt only certainty when she had let go of the rope. 

The sort of people who felt that unwavering trust about using the angled side of one of the tallest buildings in Chicago as a cuddle buddy could not possibly be playing with a full deck. She'd felt electrified, immediately craving doing it again. She'd also been terrified of the depth of the craving, convinced she was totally fruit loops. No one crawled around on the side of a building for kicks, unless they had a death wish. There was the near-guarantee of falling flat and hard on the pavement below, undeniably capital-D dead, forever. Sadly life wasn't an action movie starring Bruce Willis.

She doesn't have a death wish, but that hasn't dulled the intensity of her yearning for heights. She can't imagine falling anymore, only flying.

*

She's in Chitown for one more day, and she spends a couple of hours across the street from the Diamond, lingering on the concrete stairs of the bus stop at Michigan and Randolph. Sara takes the time to study the lines of the building, though she knows the exterior by heart. For the first time ever, she's not interested in going inside.

That night, she dreams about the Diamond again. She's inside for once, walking around the unfinished floor, trailing her fingers over the drop cloths and pushing away dangling wiring. Just like she's nine years old again, she finds the window where the plastic wrap has blown open and there's enough room to slip outside. 

This is where she likes to be – up high, looking down, close to the sky. When she falls it's because she wants to fall.

*

It's a long flight home. As they're flying back through the time zones, Sara's eyes glaze over, looking at the clouds until they disappear from view. She drifts in and out of sleep. The next leg is a long, winding drive up a mountain to her cabin. 

Clouds gather in the distance as she unlocks the door to the mudroom. A storm rolls in fast, sky black and roiling with thunder, and by the time she's redressed in a t-shirt and pajama pants, it's raining in a steady rhythm against the window panes.

Fog descends, muting the already-quiet forest around her, until even the nocturnal animals and birds are silent. She walks barefoot to the deck, opening up the French doors and leaning into the cool spray of rain on her face and neck.

She'd chopped off her bushy hair years ago, rocking a pixie cut instead and loving it. It had felt good to bare the back of her neck to the sun and the brush of a breeze. 

Stepping onto the deck, she slides one hand along the railing, staring down into the steep drop of the ravine behind her house. She'd let it grow wild for years, liking the tangled look of overgrown grass filled with seed pods, flinty rocks, and a layer of flowering climbing vines over all of it.

The crash of thunder sounds as though it has her surrounded. Jumping up onto the railing, she tucks her feet through gap by the bottom rail and holds tight. This is the closest she's ever gotten to a storm. Just like when she'd walked out of the window without hesitation twenty years ago, Sara feels buffered, protected and safe. She's fearless facing the sky. 

*

This is the lie. She's always known, ever since she was a kid gripping at the wrong side of a window. She's known that she could walk off of the ledge of her balcony and fly. She's about to prove it. Her back burns coldly and she strips off her shirt, tossing it over her shoulder. 

Sitting on the railing, with rain beating at her face and legs, a deafening crack of thunder vibrates through the entire deck. Sara can't deny it now, and she's not backing down tonight. It's not going to end when she hasn't even been courageous enough to try. This is a new starting point, only this time she'll be going up. 

Something within unfurls, and Sara stands, pressing her calves against the rails for balance. Her arms ache, and her stomach clenches as the rumbling echoes of thunder grow faint. 

No way is she closing her eyes; this time, she's ready to soar.  



End file.
